This Art Story took its time
Thanks to you, it is sweet indeed
My heart is full to bursting.
Since I first posted Melencolia — A painting reveals more than I was ready to see — I’ve learned many of your stories about life-defining choices you don’t regret but mourn, anyway. I’ve heard your memories of standing speechless before Dürer’s art in museums around the world.
I can’t wait to revisit the art story in The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, which came to one friend’s mind. Conversations about dualism and medieval Church history with some of you have been lively, to say the least!
Gorgeous art, subtle and bold, now appears in my Instagram feed, thanks to artists connected to Gary Edward Blum who were previously unknown to me.
Your kind words, curiosity, and encouragement lift me up. Hearing your own stories nourishes my soul. Thank you ❤️
Melencolia
A painting reveals more than I was ready to see
I chose to write about this painting at the beginning of January, thinking it’d be a quick story to start the year. Obviously, not. It seems that I buried a lot 20+ years ago, and found it hiding in this painting’s layers. I had no idea what would rise up, like a long-buried splinter, when I finally took the time to take a good, long look.
Inspired by an experience described in this story, I went to graduate school a few years out of college, dreaming of teaching art and architectural history one day. I’d completed my Masters and was working toward my Ph.D when life took a few unexpected turns — some wonderful, some not. While I never regretted leaving the program, the way it happened is another matter.
The body’s readiness to expel a splinter doesn’t mean it’s any less sharp. These last months have been hard, not what writing about art I love was meant to be. I’m hopeful the hiatus for psychic housekeeping will clear space for courage and a lighter heart! Now, onto the art.
Having recently moved to San Francisco from New York, I stopped in the Olga Dollar Gallery on Post Street, trying to forget the atrocious haircut I’d just gotten somewhere on Maiden Lane. This little painting by Gary Edward Blum drew me over for a closer look. Maybe its title — Melencolia — spoke to my mood as every reflection made me wince, but mostly, I recall its glowing stillness.
I ended up bringing it home, intrigued by the combination of its minimal aesthetic and overall inscrutability. Looking at it slows and deepens my breath. My body unfurls a little bit, limbs stretching out, as if to mirror the branching twig that looks like a wishbone but will never break.
Loose brush-strokes of white acrylic paint cover most of the canvas, offering occasional glimpses of what lies underneath. Muted capital letters in serif float across the canvas in horizontal bands, echoing Blum’s earlier “text paintings” of the 1990s. The letters seem to spell M-E-L-A-N-C-O-L-I-A on the painting’s top half and also on its bottom half, where they are upside-down, in reverse, and italicized. A single onion-skin page torn from a book appears to be taped over the white paint. Traces of red transfer appear on its edges, with a sooty black index notch at the top left corner.
Hints of Blum’s early interest in photorealism show in the page shadows and tape, rendered so skillfully I’m not sure what’s real or illusion. The paper’s transparency offers its own visual ambiguity; the small, backwards text of the page verso is barely decipherable behind the PART II printed on the page recto. Over this, the branching twig is painted with exquisite delicacy.
At the time, I wondered about the title’s German spelling. Was it an allusion to Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 masterwork, Melencolia I? That the torn page featured commentary somehow related to The Nativity by Petrus Christus, a Flemish painter and forebear to Dürer, could support this idea — or not. It didn’t matter. Just the ghost of Northern Renaissance art in this little painting was enough to ease a vague sense of homesickness in my gut.
Born in Nuremberg, a vibrant artistic city in southern Germany, Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was trained as a painter, engraver, and wood carver. He is often likened to his Italian contemporary, Leonardo DaVinci, for the breadth and depth of his genius. This video provides an overview of Dürer’s influence and features some of his greatest work: https://youtu.be/_2Zb_KjYGGU
Looking at Melencolia I, we see a large figure commonly identified as the personification of Melancholia, or an artist-angel wielding the tools of geometry — considered the governing principle of art and architecture. The dissatisfaction in Melancholia’s expression and posture is inescapable, because no matter how brilliant an artist’s tromp l’oeil, it will never meet or rival the work of God, Supreme Architect of the Universe (an ancient idea across many religious traditions).
Today, melancholy means sad or depressed for no clear reason, but for centuries the word carried a broader, more nuanced, meaning. It included what we might characterize as emotional sensitivity, having heightened awareness of life’s poignancy, and with it, a sense of longing both for what’s lost and what could be.
From Hippocrates until the early 19th century, a person’s health was believed to be in the balance of their four humors: blood (sanguine), yellow bile (choleric), black bile (melancholic), and phlegm (phlegmatic). Illness indicated the humors were out of balance, and treatments sought to restore it. During the medieval and Renaissance eras, an elaborate system correlated the four humors with the four elements, their qualities, the four seasons, and the planets. They understood the composition and condition of human bodies to be intimately enmeshed with the surrounding world.
Artists’ unique vulnerability to melancholia (an excess of black bile) emerged during the Renaissance as part of a larger identity blossoming. For centuries, the arts had been largely confined to the Church, and nearly all artists were anonymous. When the arts began to flourish in sacred and secular contexts, it profoundly changed the social status and self-image of artists. No longer mere craftsmen or scribes toiling for the glory of God, artists were aspiring individuals working in the secular world. This ego-emergence fueled an inner conflict that Dürer, who was particularly interested in the impact of humors on human nature, illustrates in Melencolia I. Here’s a quick tour: https://youtu.be/z11pYvaLctY
I met Dürer, Christus, and other northern Renaissance artists in a college art history class about much more than Dutch and Flemish Painting. Every class felt like scales falling from my eyes, often with tears, as altarpiece panels, landscapes, portraits, still life, and vignettes of village life flashed steadily on the screen, interspersed with photographs of the streets, churches, canals, and countryside we saw in the paintings. Peppering his commentary with personal recollections and exhortations to travel, Professor Upton talked about these artists as if they were old friends — accomplished, admired, quirky, hapless. He shared poignant details of their lives as we examined their sketches, doodles, and scribbled lists. It forged an intimacy between us. These were people who loved and suffered, cheated, feasted, labored, and endured, often penniless and occasionally prosperous. One after another, their extraordinary responses to the mysteries of being human spoke to us from the screen, across time in perfect silence.
This drive to capture and create beauty, discover and give meaning to life, is relentless. Then and now, artists don’t choose it so much as it chooses them. A divine inspiration and curse: Melencolia.
We are visual creatures, and creatures of story. Art history is not only memorizing art, artists, and their times; learning canonical narratives; and developing new ones based on evolving evidence and perspectives. These are the vocabulary and tools for discerning why it matters, then and now. It informs how we understand ourselves, relate to each other, and perceive our lives in an ever-changing world.
This sense of purpose and meaning lit me up. I wanted to stay looped in the live wire running through art of the ages; look hard, dig in, look again and again and keep looking. I wanted others to look, too, and feel their lives richer for it.
Dürer’s Melencolia I has inspired numerous interpretations, from highly persuasive to entertainingly far-fetched. Certainly at play, however, is this tension for artists living in an age of faith rooted in a Platonic dualism. The distinction of form and ideal, body and soul, shaped and upheld the division of sacred and secular during the medieval era. The arts and sciences of the Renaissance introduced challenges to a long-accepted dualistic worldview. The experience — and stories of — artists and creators bearing the gift-curse of melancholia (divinely inspired yet doomed to fall short, being sinful mortals) demonstrate the limits of a worldview based on black-and-white, either-or opposition.
As human experience and knowledge of the world expanded over the centuries, these challenges continued to mount. The either-or matrix of dualism was so reductive and static as to be fundamentally at odds with living, distorting our perspective not only on the present but on historic narratives, too. Concepts of linear time and constant forward movement could only mask the problem with the promise of progress for so long.
In the 20th century, intellectual powerhouses in philosophy and the sciences wrangled with the concept of dualism, even the language for this conceptualizing. Bertrand Russell, a German mathematician and philosopher, wrote extensively about the ways observation and analysis are limited when language itself is inflected by worldview. Mysticism and Logic, written in 1914, is one of many essays exploring this challenge. Russell would eventually reject dualism for monism, its both-and perspective allowing for the complexity we experience and continue to discover in a way that dualism’s either-or cannot.
No doubt you are wondering what any of this has to do with my painting by Gary Edward Blum. Believe me, none of it had crossed my mind until I got curious about its title. Remember the small, backwards text on the onion-skin page verso, somehow connected to Petrus Christus’ Nativity?
It came from Russell’s 1914 essay, Mysticism and Logic:
The mystic insight begins with the sense of a mystery unveiled, of a hidden wisdom now suddenly become certain beyond the possibility of a doubt. The sense of certainty and revelation comes earlier than any definite belief…
The first and most direct outcome of the moment of illumination is belief in the possibility of a way of knowledge which may be called revelation or insight or intuition, as contrasted with sense, reason, and analysis, which are regarded as blind guides leading to the morass of illusion. Closely connected with this belief is the conception of a Reality behind the world of appearance and utterly different from it. This Reality is regarded with an admiration often amounting to worship; it is felt to be always and everywhere close at hand, thinly veiled by the shows of sense, ready, for the receptive mind, to shine in its glory even through the apparent folly and wickedness of Man. The poet, the artist, and the lover are seekers after that glory: the haunting beauty that they pursue is the faint reflection of its sun. But the mystic lives in the full light of the vision: what others dimly seek he knows, with a knowledge beside which all other knowledge is ignorance. [emphasis mine]
Wondering how intentional, if at all, this content was, I went to Blum’s website and read:
I have spent the better part of two decades exploring duality and dependent opposition through my paintings and more recently, photography.
How about that.
I emailed Blum, and while he didn’t remember the “exact reasons for what and why” in my painting, he did confirm the title’s reference to Dürer’s engraving, adding that Bertrand Russell’s views on mysticism and logic had interested him at the time. “I’ve always been interested in duality,” he said.
I grabbed a magnifying glass to see what else might be in his Melencolia.
I have always loved Melencolia’s proportions. They’re just right, restrained but not constricted. Even across a large room, the relatively small canvas maintains a powerful presence. With my brain freshly re-steeped in Renaissance arcana, I measured it. Sure enough, it’s just a hair shy of a golden rectangle. In fact, traces of its ruled pencil outline appear on the picture’s edges, before the canvas wraps around its wood substructure (1.6875 inches deep). Each corner of the canvas is folded precisely, with steel brads securing every side.
Now that my eyes had adjusted to closer looking, I saw indications of a circle drawn with several sweeps of a compass (remember the tool in Melancholia’s dejected grasp?), establishing the central focus area of the painting:
Geometry provides the clear, organizing foundation to the transparent yet obscuring layers and enigmatic meaning of Blum’s Melencolia, just as mathematical precision undergirds Dürer’s Melencolia I, measurable in both its composition and disposition of cryptic medieval symbols.
Considering that it’s a relatively early work, I imagine Melencolia shows a young Blum emulating Dürer’s enterprise of the same name, perhaps allowing for the ambiguities of both-and thinking. He employs dualistic organizing principles — black-white, up-down, front-back, vertical-horizontal — in a picture that first appears to be two-dimensional, but it is very intentionally three, not only the built canvas but the collage of onion skin paper and tape so thin we doubt our eyes, even our touch.
The slender branch — tripartite with oblique angles and variation in every tip, knot, and striation — rests lightly atop it all, its tromp l’oeil urging us to see three dimensions where there are two. I don’t know what this branch means. Perhaps it alludes to the mysticism of nature, and its ultimate triumph over art.
Digging back into Europe’s medieval and Renaissance art, history, philosophy, and associated rabbit holes for this story strained my brain, but my love for its questions, quirks, and timeless relevance burns bright as ever.
I just hadn’t planned on unearthing sadness and shame for abandoning a professional and personal passion I’d given so much to, not to mention shame for being sad at all, because at least I had the luxury of choice. All of this folded into the stubborn, low-grade shame for not being one of the extraordinary women who managed to do grad school, career, marriage, children, and family well. I know and love several, and simply put, wish I could have swung it, too.
But here’s what came to me, after weeks of feeling like such a walking shame: I never set out to do it all. At the ripe age of 24, I had my solitary, scholarly life all planned out. I went to grad school thinking I wasn’t the marrying kind, much less suited for motherhood. Having these assumptions proven wrong is, without any question, the greatest gift of my life. It only makes sense that my original plan needed to change.
Now, rather than judge her as too weak to cut it, I ache for the young woman I was, newly married and separated from my husband by an ocean, exhausted, scared to fail, and consumed by self doubt. I’m sad she didn’t have seasoned and encouraging counsel, because she simply didn’t have the perspective to trust that an alternative, more sustainable, professional path in art could emerge if she’d just slow down, steady on, and stay with the work. She could have used a “Dear 26-Year-Old Me” letter.
As ridiculous as it sounds, this also came to me: the art, architecture, and history hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s no less mine to love and learn about, just because a dissertation with my name on it isn’t mouldering in a university archive. Nor do I need to freight it with a lot of old shame baggage. At nearly 52 years old, I really don’t have time for that sh*t.
I do have time for art. And how beautiful is it, that the little painting storing away all that unacknowledged pain is the very one to show me a way forward? Whatever Blum’s intent, to my eye Melencolia offers visual resolution to the either-or thinking that turned me away from work I loved. It invites living in the relational energy of perceived opposition, placing faith in the larger unity of their interdependence. Maybe this explains the serenity it has brought me all along.
